An Invitation. Your Thoughts from Michael Roberts …. sent to SELECT PALS on 31 October 2020
I just caught parts of THE HARD TALK grilling of a French lady politician [by Stephen Sackur]. One problem with journalism is its wholly presentist focus//limits. In my view the recent jihadist attacks in France cannot be comprehended without looking at the motivations and goals of, say
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Tamara Kunanayakam, in The Island, 2 November 2020, where the title runs thus: “US-Lanka military alliance in the wake of Pompeo visit”
Former Ambassador/Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva
Former Chairperson of UN Working Group on the Right to Development
In fact, a military alliance between the US and Sri Lanka already exists. By signing ACSA in 2007, and renewing it in 2017, Sri Lanka committed its strategic entry points – ports and airports, our armed forces, our military installations, food, oil, and spare parts, to the US for its war against China.
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FOR POMPEO
Charindra in Morning Star, 28 October 2020, entitled “China a Predator …”
Visiting US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo today (28) called China a “predator” and the US a friend of Sri Lanka. “We see from bad deals, violations of sovereignty, lawlessness on land and at sea that the Chinese Communist Party is a predator. The United States comes as a friend and a partner,” he said at a press conference held at the Foreign Ministry.
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Greg Bearup, in The Weekend Australian Magazine, October 9, 2020, where the title is “Different Strokes. Life after Cricket”
The office of the Steve Waugh Foundation is up the stairs and down the back of a block of shops on the outskirts of Cronulla’s CBD in Sydney’s south. The office, like the bloke, is devoid of frou-frou. It exists to get the job done and each year it distributes more than a million dollars to help kids with rare diseases. And then in walks Steve Waugh with his famous pout and his thousand-yard stare – the man who led one of the most dominant teams in the long history of Test cricket. Remember those gratifying years when humiliation of the Poms was an annual ritual, like raking up and burning leaves each autumn? “We’re not here to win friends, mate,” he once said, summing up the attitude of the team under his reign.
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SUGGGESTIONS from An ASIA WATCHER
·* it would be good if someone not so high in the government dealt with him, rather than the top leadership
·* That technique i described above is called “The Shanghai Treatment” and is well known in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.
George Koo & K J Noh in ASIA TIMES, 19 October 2020 … https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/pompeos-record-a-litany-of-failure/
Mike Pompeo, otherwise known as the international man of catastrophe, by wide acclaim, has earned a label as the worst secretary of state in the history of the United States, while appropriately enough serving under its worst president.
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Michael Roberts
The photograph above of the twenty-two men who participated in the cricket match in 1910 between George Vanderspar’s XI and eleven British civil servants in Ceylon has been taken from SP Foenander’s wonderful book Sixty Years of Ceylon Cricket published in Colombo in 1924. Its import ranges beyond the cricket field.
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Michael Roberts
The sea lanes of the British Empire took men (rather than women) far and wide. Sri Lankan traders, many of them from Galle and its hinterland, traded in Mombasa, Zanzibar and even as far inland as Blantyre in the Rhodesias during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Others went as workers to Thursday Island and northern Australia.[1] Yet others traded at Singapore or joined the colonial service in Malaysia.[2] A few intrepid souls ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean. David Scott, a scholar-academic from Jamaica whose writings encompass the Sri Lankan scene, is descended from one such diasporic Lankan through his mother.
So, too, did four sons of Barbados end up in Sri Lanka as part of the British colonial order during the early twentieth century. This is a partial picture of their engagements in the field of cricket. Let me identify them first and note that there is self-interest in this story.
T.W. Roberts (1880-1976)
J.C.W. Rock (c.1886-1946)
T.F.C. Roberts (1901-1984)
Gilbert C. Roberts (1903-81)
TW Roberts is standing on the extreme left
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thuppahi
